Damn, I forgot to post here! Chapter Twenty has been up for a week.

In fact, I’m only $28.56 short of posting Chapter Twenty-One, but the surge of donations seems to have run its course.

I still haven’t started the second draft; I haven’t been getting all that much writing done lately. Not sure why. Just not feeling motivated.

Thanks to one very large donation and a few smaller ones, Chapter Nineteen is now posted for all to read, and Chapter Twenty is paid for but not posted yet. (I’m thinking I’ll probably post it Tuesday.)

The serial might yet be finished. We’ll see.

Not much else to say; I haven’t started work on the second draft yet. Wildside says I can have a contract whenever I’m ready, but they aren’t in a rush.

Oh, they also mentioned that the sell-through for The Sorcerer’s Widow in bricks-&-mortar Barnes & Noble outlets has been disappointing; if you happen to see copies in your local B&N, do whatever you can to help them find homes. Returns won’t help Wildside’s bottom line or my prospects of getting future titles into real-world stores.

(Online sales have done just fine; it’s only traditional bookstores where it hasn’t moved.)

Thanks for your support, everyone.

Chapter Eighteen of Relics of War, a.k.a. Ishta’s Companion, has now been posted. I’m actually still $1.04 short, but there’s no point in being obsessive about it.

I’ve also posted an announcement concerning the serial.

The first draft is completely written; it runs twenty-four chapters and a brief epilogue, totaling 73,115 words. I haven’t started the second draft yet; been busy with non-writing stuff.

Can’t think of anything else that needs mentioning. Thanks to everyone who’s donated!

Chapter Seventeen is posted, at long last.

I’m a couple of pages from finishing Chapter Twenty, and I estimate the novel will run about twenty-two chapters, give or take. I should be able to get the rest written in a few days if I stop letting myself get distracted.

Of course, then it will need to be revised and all the usual stuff.

You know, folks who donated $20 for the paper edition are getting something of a bargain — it’s running longer than I expected. I cut it from $25 to $20 because I thought it would only run about 50,000 words, and it’s going to be well over 60,000. Absolutely not a problem, though; thanks for the support.

I think that’s about it, really.

I am pleased to report that Chapter Sixteen has finally been posted — we hit the magic number at 10:15 last night. I hadn’t been expecting it, so I didn’t have the files ready to go, but they’re up now.

(I had somehow recorded three donations in the wrong category in my records, which I caught last night when I realized the totals didn’t match my memory, but it wouldn’t have much affected when the chapter went up — those three would not have put it over the top without yesterday’s contributions. But if I’d had them right I might have realized how close it was and had the files ready.)

Chapter Eighteen isn’t finished yet; we were on vacation last week, so I only got a single page written, and before that the holidays and illness were delaying things. I’m hoping that now all that stuff is out of the way I’ll be more productive.

Meanwhile, Tor has been reissuing my books in trade paperback. The new edition of A Young Man Without Magic has been available for a month, and I’ve received my author copies of the new edition of Dragon Weather, which should be out next week.

Hope all of you who were in the area affected by last week’s “polar vortex” are okay; we missed it. By pure luck, our Caribbean vacation took us away from all that record cold.

(For those of you overseas, or who live in the unaffected portions of the U.S. and somehow weren’t paying attention, last week brought most of the U.S. and Canada several days of arctic conditions, with record low temperatures.)

Anyway. It’s a new year, and it’s started well for me; I hope it’s as good for all of you.

We’re still $61.00 short of posting Chapter Sixteen, and what with the holidays, house guests, and health issues (I’ve had a series of colds and bugs for almost a month now), I’m still only partway through writing Chapter Eighteen. This is further complicated by the realization that the ending in my original outline (there’s half a page of outline left to cover) isn’t very good, and I’d like to devise a better one.

But I’m going to finish this, and it probably won’t take too much longer. Posting it all… well, we’ll see, but I’m not optimistic.

I’m going to be doing some traveling, and while I’m taking my computer with me, I probably won’t have time to get all that much work done. If we do get that $61.00 in, I still may not get Chapter Sixteen posted until I get back on the 12th. We’ll see.

A minor bit of Ethshar news: The new edition of Ithanalin’s Restoration is scheduled for June.

A less-definite bit of Ethshar news: I’ve been plotting the next Ethshar novel, Stone Unturned, when Ishta’s Companion is being uncooperative. It’s beginning to feel as if it wants to be three or four separate stories instead of one big one. There would still be a novel with the main plot, but a couple of subplots don’t seem to want to merge in and might wind up as separate novelets, novellas, or even novels in their own right, though they’d still intersect the main story for a couple of chapters. It’ll be interesting to see how it all works out — but this means I probably can’t do it as a serial, even if I wanted to.

And I need to finish Ishta’s Companion first, anyway.

Chapter Fifteen has finally put in an appearance.

Chapter Sixteen is written, as donors should know — I’ve been e-mailing chapters to donors as soon as they’re ready, rather than making them wait for the postings. Chapter Seventeen ran into Thanksgiving and other delays, and is still less than half written. I’m now estimating that the novel will run about twenty chapters, but that could still be off a couple of chapters either way.

I’m going to finish the novel, and Wildside intends to publish it, regardless of what happens to the serialization.

Thanks to a “clever” spammer, as of last night no e-mail from my ISP is getting through to Hotmail addresses — or certain other domains, but I’m not sure exactly which. At least one is in Australia. If you think you should have received a notice of some sort from me and you haven’t, that’s probably why. We’re working on getting it fixed.

I think that’s it for now. Happy holidays!

Chapter Fifteen is still only about half paid for.

I’ve written Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen, and started Seventeen. Still don’t know how many there will be; if I really had to I could probably wrap it up in eighteen, twenty is much more likely, and it could easily go longer than that.

I’ve sent Chapter Fifteen to donors, and will be sending Chapter Sixteen shortly. I’m mildly unhappy that there’s a sort of political lecture stuck into some dialogue in Chapter Sixteen, but it’s in character and probably necessary.

What with jury duty and Thanksgiving coming up, I don’t know how productive I’ll be for the rest of the month.

Happy holidays, folks!

Chapter Fourteen is finally posted. Money did continue to trickle in, and finally reached the necessary total. There’s even already a small start on Chapter Fifteen, though it still has a goodly way to go.

Maybe everyone was busy with Hallowe’en before.

Anyway, there it is, and Chapter Fifteen is mostly written, with still probably a couple of pages to go. Chapter Fifteen will complete what I’ve been thinking of as the first part of the story — or really, maybe the second, if you want to consider the trip to Varag as Part One, and from there to where we are now as Part Two.

In any case, there’s one more chunk to the story, and I have no idea how long it will be; we’ll have to see how it develops. It takes up a page and a half of the original seven-page outline, but that page and a half is a bit sketchy. It might be just a couple of chapters, or develop into half the story.

I’m not going to try to maintain a weekly schedule anymore; I’ll post new chapters as fast as they’re written and paid for. (Both are required.) We’ll see how it goes.

Chapter Fourteen has not been posted, as we aren’t even close to having it paid for. I’ve e-mailed it to contributors, and will continue to do that with new chapters as I finish them. I’ll post them as they’re paid for, but it appears that won’t be anywhere near weekly.

If anyone wants to talk about Chapter Fourteen, here’s a place to do so. Spoiler warnings might be nice, but really, I don’t have a great deal of sympathy for anyone who comes here and hasn’t kicked in a few bucks who then encounters spoilers.